Pianist prodigy Conrad Tao returns as adult with another original piece

Thursday

“At the time, Conrad was performing quite a bit with another young pianist,” Chen said, “and they were getting quite a bit of attention in the industry.”

In the winter of 2006, intrigued with the possibility of hiring Tao as a guest artist, Chen traveled to Chicago, where the pianist was scheduled to give a performance.

“I very specifically remember there was really a sense of maturity about him even at such a young age,” Chen said, “in not only his stage presence but his interpretation.”

Upon meeting the pianist and his mother, however, Chen discovered that his talents were not limited to the keyboard.

“We had dinner and, out of that wonderful conversation at McCormick & Schmick’s seafood restaurant in Chicago, learned that he composes,” Chen said. “That just evolved into the idea of, ‘Hey, if we’re going to have you come as a soloist, why don’t you write your own concerto?’”

In 2007, Tao and the orchestra performed his original composition, “The Four Elements for Piano and Orchestra.” The next year, he composed a second piece for the orchestra — a commemoration of its 30th anniversary, “Fanfare ProMusica.”

In a concert on Sunday, Tao and ProMusica will pick up where they left off. The pianist will join the orchestra for the debut of his latest piece, “Over.” Tao will also be the soloist on Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Piano Concerto in D major”; the orchestra alone will perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

Music Director David Danzmayr will conduct.

Central Ohio audiences who first encountered Tao in his previous appearances with ProMusica will find a changed artist.

“Not only was it a decade ago I was working with them, it was ... my first real, proper orchestral commission ever,” said Tao, 23, who now lives in Manhattan. “Between 13 and 23, you basically start to become a person.”

In the years since he last worked with ProMusica, the pianist has studied at Columbia University, recorded several albums (including “Pictures” and “Voyages”) and performed as an artist-in-residence with orchestras in Dallas and Hong Kong.

“I am not surprised at all to know how far he’s come,” Chen said, “and I have just so enjoyed watching and hearing his career completely blossom.”

Tao, a native of Urbana, Illinois, said that he was a year-and-a-half old when his piano-playing began.

“The only reason I know that is because we have VHS tapes that are dated,” said Tao, who dates his music-composition career to age 3.

“I had these old sketchbooks of staff paper ... and I was trying to teach myself notation because I had started reading music,” Tao said. “I’m simultaneously trying to teach myself the mechanics of just the basic, basic, basic vocabulary, and then trying to square that with emerging creative impulses.”

Tao describes the experience of being commissioned to write “The Four Elements for Piano and Orchestra” for ProMusica as “the most thrilling thing I’d ever done.”

“It was a very positive experience all around,” he said. “It was definitely an early vote of confidence.”

ProMusica commissioned Sunday’s piece, “Over,” under the auspices of its Composer/Performer Project, in which artists who both write and make music are highlighted.

Tao said the work is rooted in his reflections on what he calls his generation’s habit of “oversharing.”

“I grew up in the age of LiveJournal, which then became Tumblr, which then became Twitter,” Tao said. “As the concept evolved, and as I kept taking notes and trying to parse out what I was curious about, I just started finding the word itself interesting.”

The three-part piece also finds musical ways to reflect other meanings of the word “over.”

“I was very interested in the notion of ‘over’ as in ‘done,’ as in ‘finished,’ as in ‘the end,’” Tao said. “‘Over’ as in ‘above,’ and ‘over’ as in the prefix ... like ‘over’ as in ‘decadent,’ as in ‘excessive.’”

Tao helped to select the other piece he will play on Sunday, Haydn’s “Piano Concerto in D major.”

“It was the first piano concerto I ever learned as a 5-year-old, and then I never played it again,” Tao said. “It is nice to have something that has a root in some personal history.”

For her part, Chen takes pride in ProMusica’s continuing history with Tao.

“He’s obviously been incredibly busy; he had growing up to do,” Chen said. “But we had always talked about having him come back.”

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